After Dark by Haruki Murakami

30 May 2011 2 Comments

by Dani Cotton in 2011, Book Reviews

The midnight hour approaches in an almost empty all-night diner. Mari sips her coffee and glances up from a book as a young man, a musician, intrudes on her solitude. Both have missed the last train home. The musician has plans to rehearse with his jazz band all night, Mari is equally unconcerned and content to read, smoke and drink coffee until dawn. They realise they’ve been acquainted through Eri, Mari’s beautiful sister. The musician soon leaves with a promise to return. Shortly afterwards Mari will be interrupted a second time by a girl from the Alphaville Hotel; a Chinese prostitute has been hurt by a client, the girl has heard Mari speaks fluent Chinese and requests her help.

 

Meanwhile Eri is at home and sleeps a deep, heavy sleep that is ‘too perfect, too pure’ to be normal; pulse and respiration at the lowest required level. She has been in this soporific state for two months; Eri has become the classic myth – a sleeping beauty. But tonight as the digital clock displays 00:00 a faint electrical crackle is perceptible, a hint of life flickers across the TV screen, though the television’s plug has been pulled.

 

Murakami, acclaimed master of the surreal, returns with a stunning new novel, where the familiar can become unfamiliar after midnight, even to those that thrive in small hours. With After Dark we journey beyond the twilight. Strange nocturnal happenings, or a trick of the night?

 

I seem to be very good at the moment at choosing novels that are very difficult to write a proper review for, and this is definitely one of them. It was interesting, and will certainly have provided me with something to mull over and think about for many days to come, mostly to try and decipher what the events of the novel were supposed to mean – to decipher the ‘hidden meaning’ behind it all.

For me the novel read very well, and it seemed in some places to be written almost as stage directions in a script for a theatrical production. I found it especially fascinating that the reader should be directly addressed and that we should be given a place next to the narrator, so we are not seeing things through their eyes, as would be normal for such a novel, but we are drawn into the novel and are experiencing the events apparently for ourselves. This adds a slightly surreal touch to the novel that is not unpleasant.

Another truly original and unique work of art from the spectacular Haruki Murakami.

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